About this Event
To project and uplift the immigrants’ voices, Arthur employs refined silk fabric as an alternative skin, with each tent’s drawn-upon exterior serving as a tattoo or a sculptural codex, featuring specific, biographical, and cultural iconography. - Claudia E. Zapata
Project for Empty Space is thrilled to announce the pre-release of an editioned artist book by our Artist in Residence, Daphne Arthur. This 40-page, 6” x 9” mixed-media art book presents images from her exhibition, Fragile Intangibilities, and includes contributions from Ayokunle Falomo, Tobias Wray, and Claudia E. Zapata. The book features delicate, hand-painted silk organza layers that separate the text, beautifully mirroring the exhibition’s primary translucent material. This limited edition of 100 copies is signed by the artist.
The official book release party and artist talk will take place on Wednesday, April 16, from 6–8 PM at PES Ironside (110 Edison Place, Newark, NJ). RSVP and reserve your copy now!
About the Contributors:
Ayokunle Falomo is Nigerian, American, and the author of Autobiomythography of (Alice James Books, 2024), AFRICANAMERICAN’T (FlowerSong Press, 2022—finalist for Texas Institute of Letters' Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry), two self-published collections and African, American (New Delta Review, 2019; selected by Selah Saterstrom as the winner of New Delta Review’s 8th annual chapbook contest). A recipient of fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, MacDowell, and the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where he obtained his MFA in Creative Writing—Poetry, his work has been anthologized and widely published. You can find out more information about him at afalomo.com
Claudia E. Zapata (they/them) earned their PhD in art history at Southern Methodist University's RASC/a: Rhetorics of Art, Space, and Culture program. They received their BA and MA in art history from the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in Maya art (250–900 CE). From 2010-2014, Zapata was the curator of exhibitions and programs at the Mexic-Arte Museum. They held the position of curatorial assistant of Latinx art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum from 2018–2022. Currently, they are the Blanton Museum of Art's first associate curator of Latino art. www.claudiaelisazapata.com
Tobias Wray’s No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man won the Lighthouse Poetry Series Competition. His work has found homes in Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, Impossible Archetype, Blackbird, and The Georgia Review. Poems also appear in Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology (Autumn House Press) and Poetry Is Bread (Nirala Press). Most recently, he was awarded a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship in support of new projects, including a manuscript on grief called Daddy Essay. tobiaswray.com
About the exhibition:
Fragile Intangibilities comprises 11 hand-sewn silk organza camping tents. Each tent is suffused with drawings made with ink inspired by interviews that Arthur conducted. Arthur, a Venezuelan-born immigrant, was in conversation with fellow first-generation immigrants and migrants in New York City and Connecticut.
These floating, translucent mobile homes depict the unique and personal stories as kaleidoscopic spectrums of amalgamated memories. They contain depictions of personal mythologies that families reproduce. Interrelated sequences do not merely establish human action in time, they also establish themselves in memory, which repeats and re-collects the course of events. Engaging the theme of movement and confronting these histories, the travelers’ retelling requires a return to the past to reformulate the story in the present and to bring it forward to the possibilities of the future. Continue reading here.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Ironside Newark, 110 Edison Place, Newark, United States
USD 0.00 to USD 150.00
